Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a very powerful form of online marketing which can often be carried out at low cost and yet produce impressive results. Search engine marketing seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the practise of guiding the development or redevelopment of a website so that it will naturally attract visitors by winning top rankings on the major search engines for selected keywords or phrases. In other words, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimising a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. A high natural position on search engines is the most powerful form of online marketing. By using keywords and relevant content, a SEO campaign will make a website more visible on search engines. This means that relevant traffic can find your website at the very point they are looking for your product or services. Research has shown that the majority of internet users are likely to only check the first or second pages of any internet search they input, therefore the importance of search engine optimisation on the success of a website is becoming more important as the web continues to grow and more and more websites become available.

A website that has been fully optimised for relevant keywords can achieve higher page listings on a search engine. By holding a high position in search engine listings means a website will see an immediate increase in the amount of people (traffic) using the site on a regular basis and therefore potentially increasing the profitability of the website instantly.

At Pittheus Business Consulting we use a mixture of search engine marketing strategies and we believe that is always better to incorporate search engine optimisation when a website is being developed rather than trying to retroactively apply it. Below you will find summarised the range of search engine marketing strategies that our team is using:

Search Engine Optimisation techniques can be classified into two broad categories, techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design (White Hat) and techniques that search engines do not approve of (Black Hat). Many companies have adopted "black hat" techniques, such as cloaking, hidden text and keyword spamming. Such techniques can help obtain high placements on the search engine result pages, however you run a serious risk of being penalised or even banned once the search engines detect these techniques as they almost always do.